When It's Time to Go
Don’t be alarmed by this blog’s title. It’s not the latest installment in my morbid search for final resting places. No, I thought I’d lighten things up a bit, taking you on a trip instead to all the places we rest along the way. Yes, today we’ll travel to some of the best bathrooms in America.
At first blush (or should I say, at first flush) the bathroom is a mundane place—with an overabundance of white porcelain, the smell of urinal cakes and the inequality of longer lines for women than men. We treat it like a wait station, a banal Christian purgatory or a boring Buddhist bardo, some place we must go to when we’re on our way to somewhere else. According to some statistics, we spend two and a half years in the bathroom over our lifetimes. And almost half of it was spent on the toilet. Bathrooms need their due.
Before crossing the portal, the bathroom’s signage can make us feel we’re going to “where no man has gone before.”
On entering, they can be entertaining, like the world famous Haunted Bathroom at Wonder Fair that’s inhabited by a ghost cat. It can even be educational, helping us consider the current state of our mental health. The Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, MO has gone as far to incorporate their mission statement into each bathroom. Each room has a different psychiatric theme—be it Freud, illusions, hauntings or phobias. While I don’t suffer from coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), I think we can all agree no one wants a clown watching us when doing our business.
Bathrooms have become an unnecessary political flash point. After the gender-neutral toilets were recently installed at our new Kansas City airport, there was nothing more uncomfortably entertaining than watching the unsure travelers hovering in the main communal room, trying to pick their individual toilet. Everyone seemed stuck in limbo, not wanting to pick the wrong one. Turns out, it’s not some test. All doors are the right ones, all are equal. That is, if they aren’t already lit up red and occupied.
Bathrooms can also be art, or vice versa. John Waters got this. When bequeathing his art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art, he did it under one condition, they rename the bathrooms in his honor and make them all gender neutral.
“Public restrooms make all people nervous. They’re unpredictable. They’re also fueled by accidents, just like my favorite contemporary art.” —John Waters
Sandy Skoglund’s beautifully tiled bathroom at The Smith College Museum of Art is filled with black and white vignettes depicting early civilizations, in-between hundreds, and hundreds of water drops. While the water may be symbolic of myths and folklore, seeing the dripping water might encourage something less metaphorical with our current business at hand.
Lucas, KS is a delightfully quirky little city (population 335), always medaling in any contest for “the best small art town in America.” You can’t walk a block without bumping into a sculpture forged from reused car parts or a utility pole bejeweled with art. They’ve even made their public bathroom into art. The Bowl Plaza is exclusively dedicated to our bodily functions, even resembling a large toilet. But not everyone has the art bug in Lucas, as it was originally a farming community. To get the more skeptical townspeople involved before building Bowl Plaza, the artists asked everyone to donate a personal object or something broken for the project. Now hundreds, if not thousands of personal artifacts are imbedded in the tiled walls, making it truly a community bathroom.
While there are 1,100 public toilets in the naked city, this is the story of one exceptional bathroom found at The Center in Greenwich Village. Designed by pop and graffiti artist Keith Haring, the mural circles around the full length of the second-floor bathroom in the LGBTQ Community Center. But don’t be expecting to see Keith’s ubiquitous whimsical drawings of babies, barking dogs or dancing stick figures. Once Upon A Time is a celebration of unadulterated sex pre-AIDS, done at the time to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. With Haring’s work going for as much as 6 million at auction, it certainly is one of the most expensive bathrooms in the world. While no longer a functional bathroom, it could certainly also win the award for the most penises freely on display.
There are other artists who use the toilet solely as art, putting them on a pedestal or using them as a political statement. One such place is Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, where the toilet is a drinking fountain. A sign above it bitingly reads “Colored.” At Red Oak II in Carthage, MO, rural folk artist, Lowell Davis lines the streets of his make-believe miniature Main Street town with his signature metal signs and non-sensical sayings. As all the toilets are non-functioning, and with the sights being in the middle of nowhere, make sure to plan a pit stop beforehand.
For my final stop, I have no picture to share on this blog. While I’ve traveled to Graceland three times in my life (and counting), the world’s most coveted toilet there is under tight security. While 600,000 visitors tour Elvis's mansion and gravesite every year, the upstairs bedroom and bathroom are completely off limits.
On August 16, 1977, Elvis was found by his girlfriend, slumped over the toilet. The G-rated cause of death circulated by Graceland Enterprise Inc. was that of cardiac arrhythmia, a simple heart attack. The unofficial and widely reported reason was the inevitable avalanche set off by the mountain of his daily pills—Percodan, Demerol, Codeine and Quaaludes. He had enough inside him to kill a rhinoceros. To counteract all the conflicting drugs, he added laxatives to his daily arsenal, leading to the rumors he had to put on diapers before going to bed in his later years. All of this was refuted by Graceland, insisting every pill Elvis took had been properly prescribed and that he wore gold pajamas the night he died.
Since the mansion has been open to the public, a security guard is positioned at the bottom and top of the stairs, making sure no eager fans can make a mad dash. Even the staff who have worked there for decades haven’t been up there. President Clinton once asked but was denied. Only the chief archivist at Graceland, Priscilla Presley and her now deceased daughter, Lisa Marie, have access to these rooms. The rooms have remained completely as they were back in 1977, with the last record that Elvis played still on the turntable.
There are rumors that Nick Cage was given rare access, crossing over the upstairs transom when briefly married to Lisa Marie. Cage, a known Elvis fanatic, took full advantage, laying on the bed and trying on a leather jacket once worn by Elvis. Though never confirmed, Cage was also allowed to peak into the bathroom—catching a glimpse of the throne, and the final resting place of a king.